In her introduction to 9 Plays By Black Women (1986), Margaret B. Wilkerson observes: "The new generation of black women playwrights represented in this anthology is no longer bound by the restrictions of theatrical realism and cultural inhibitions" (xxiii).  Although Suzan-Lori Parks only began writing Imperceptible Mutabilities of the Third Kingdom (1989)¹ in the year that 9 Plays was published, Wilkerson's observation proves useful in contextualizing both the play and the playwright.  With its questioning of patriarchal domination and its emphasis on female communities, feminist drama undeniably shapes Parks' artistic engagement.  Borrowing a page from Maria Irene Fornes and Joan Schenkar, Parks foregrounds the woman's body and the social transactions that manipulate it.  While these influences form a substantial foundation for IM, the nexus of the writer's aesthetic and political preoccupations is the existential matrix of African-American life.  In this regard, Parks' tragicomic depictions of black experience recall George C. Wolfe's The Colored Museum (1988) and the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks.  

Many questions confront a reader/spectator who attempts to understand Suzan-Lori Parks' IM.  What is an imperceptible mutability?  Where exactly is the third kingdom?  Although these questions seemingly lead in different directions, their answers all center on the exploration of African-American and womanist consciousness.  Parks infuses this dramatic work with a gradually accumulating density of black and female existential dilemmas.  Focusing on the overlap of these experiences, she also presents the freest possible interplay between gender, race, and economy, thereby elucidating the complicated process of identity formation.  Her strategy couples strong political engagement and innovative aesthetics.  A critical examination of IM demonstrates the vitality of the hybrid engine that propels Parks' work and suggests the richness of the sources that contribute to her inimitable voice.   

Critics unfailingly observe that Suzan-Lori Parks describes IM as "African-American history in the shadow of the photographic image."²  After citing this description, they usually explicate the playwright's remark by asserting that "the photographic image" represents a white mainstream formulation of black historical experience.³   In this scheme, the play embodies a corrective or revisionist "African-American history," intended to challenge--and ultimately, to undermine--the authority of the dominant historical narrative.  The dialectical relationship implicit in this conception of IM illustrates the tensions and the oscillations that typify Parks' depiction of African-American identity.  While she brings deft particularity to her sketches of black life, Parks carefully contextualizes her characters by showing the swirl of forces that play around them.  Looking at IM through the lens of an ever-evolving process of identity-formation helps clarify the oft-noted fecundity of meaning in Parks' play.  

Can a dramatic text establish itself as African-American history?  What does it mean for a drama to take place in the shadow of the photographic image?  How is the identity of an African-American woman mediated by her relationship with language?  IM raises these questions and offers some very provocative answers as it fulfills Suzan-Lori Parks' commitment "to explore The-Drama-of-the-Black-Person-
as-an-Integral-Facet-of-the-Universe" ("Equation" 21).  On one level, the play appears a dramatization of Suzan-Lori Parks' statement: "I am an African-American woman--this is the form I take, my content predicates this form, and this form is inseparable from my content" ("Ele­ments" 8).  IM's attention to the roles of black women supports this view; nevertheless, a multifaceted artistic inventiveness conditions the writer's treatment of  womanist issues.  Searching for fresh dramatic styles, Parks meditates on blackness and womanhood, producing a capacious and a malleable portrait of the process of self-definition. The relationship between photographic imagery, black history, and the politics of language use forms a core that any attempt to analyze this work must examine.   

In the permutations surrounding Parks' manipulation of photography and photo­graphs, one finds a compelling starting point for an elucidation of the writer's iden­tity-mapping strategies.  "Open House," part three of IM, could easily be re-titled "Cheesing," since many of its central episodes focus on some aspect of smiling.  Aretha begins the segment with the line, "Smile, honey, smile" (41).⁴  Charles ends scene E with an almost incantatory repetition of the word "smile," and "Open House" concludes with Aretha's declaration, "Smile or no smile mm gonna remember you.  MM gonna remember you grinnin" (48, 54).  Though the prominence of smiling recedes in "Greeks (or The Slugs)," the final act of IM, it still receives a pointed engagement as Mr. Smith observes, "Smiling at work.  They like smiles" (58).  

An ambiguity inheres in the interpretation of smiles, and this ambiguity preoccupies Suzan-Lori Parks in "Open House" and "Greeks (or The Slugs)."    Precisely, she plays upon the connections between smiling and photographs to suggest an ironic metaphor for the production of racial and gender identities.  By emphasizing the relationship between visual images and social constructions of race and gender, Parks recalls the episode in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) where Janie, upon looking at herself in a picture, suddenly recognizes the fact of her blackness (Hurston 21).  bell hooks suggests the importance of this looking to identity formation: "Critical black female spectatorship emerges as a site of resistance only when individual black women actively resist the imposition of dominant ways of knowing and looking" (128). 

Aretha, apparently a slave and ostensibly a house-keeper in "Open House," wants some pictures of Anglor, Blanca, and Charles.  Considering her imminent departure, Aretha's desire for these photos can be interpreted as a quest for mementos of her time in the Saxon household.  Charles suggests this use of the photographs when he tells Aretha, "These will make some lovely shots--give the children some wonderful memories" (48).   The "double-frame slide show" projected above the participants in "Open House" also supports this reading (the first slide depicts "Aretha hugging Anglor and Blanca" while subsequent stills chronicle "the enlargement of smiles" on these characters' faces), but Anglor's and Blanca's resistance to Aretha's coaxing alerts the spectator that things are more complicated (41).  Although Aretha's syntax in addressing Anglor ("Mr. Anglor"), Blanca ("Miss Blanca"), and Charles ("Mr. Charles") clearly suggests a position of servitude, the housekeeper is introduced in scene B as "Mrs. Aretha Saxon" (41, 42).  The practice of slaves taking the surnames of their masters is widely documented, but the phenomenon of masters fathering children by their slaves is likewise pervasive.  As Solomon points out, a definitive kinship bond between Aretha and the Saxon family is impossible to establish, but the integration of Aretha into the Saxon brood brings a particular poignancy to this segment's representation of image production ("Signifying on the Signifyin' " 75).  

The slide show mechanically broadens the smiles of the principals.  Continuously, it illustrates the postures of Anglor, Aretha, and Blanca.  The slides offer testimonies to the presence of these characters, but the continuity implied in their smooth progression contrasts strongly with the trauma that Aretha experiences in her interaction with smiles.  Along the lines of depth perception, slides produce two-dimensional or "flat" portraits while, in the world of "Open House," Aretha struggles to produce a three-dimensional image: namely, that of herself.  The fullness of three-dimensional image production, with its strong implication of drama, is clearly one connotation of the third kingdom found in IM's title.  On some level, the depictions in the play struggle to confront the inadequacy of stereotype and to contribute a roundness to stagings of the black experience.⁵  This attempt is not without its expense, and that cost is a return to an excruciating past, accompanied by a heightened awareness both of the body and its relationship to texts.⁶  

Anglor and Blanca originally refuse to smile for Aretha because "She won't fetch the dolls" (41).  The brattish quality of their protest belies a more serious anxiety that they feel in the wake of Aretha's departure.  Expressing this anxiety in a catalog of questions, the children ask, "Who's going to sew up girl doll when she pops?!  Who's going to chastise boy doll!? . . .  Who's going to clean our commodes?!" (42).  These housekeeping chores define Aretha for the children; she is essentially equated with her physical labor, labor that in its most profound sense goes unrecognized.  One symptom of this non-recognition is Anglor's rejection of Aretha as a potential domestic.  In scene F, Miss Faith, showing the adult Anglor and Blanca an apartment, asks, "You need help.  She (Aretha) comes with the place" (52).⁷  Anglor declines with a curt observation: "Not a good example for the breed" (52).  While this denial purportedly stems from Anglor's objection to Aretha's toothlessness, he and Blanca ironically do not recognize an even more vaginal labor that Aretha performed for them.  Whether one accepts that Aretha is the biological mother of Anglor and Blanca or not, the motherly quality of her interaction with the kids is obvious.  Their detached "We know her from somewhere" in scene F not only communicates a forgetfulness of Aretha's early nurturing of their lives, but it also marks a crisis of seeing or imaging that manifests most fully in the scenes involving Miss Faith, Charles, and Aretha (52).  

During scene B, Miss Faith tells Aretha, "Mrs. Saxon, book says you are due for an extraction" (44).  Aside from the direct references to the particulars of the slave trade that saturate this exchange, the episode also inaugurates the dominance of books over Aretha's body.  Parks illustrates the merger of these two themes as she continually cites James A. Rawley's The Transatlantic Slave Trade (1981), but a more overt presentation of the politics of textuality is laid out in scenes C and D.  As Aretha approaches Charles, in scene C, to seek a new home, religious diction characterizes her speech, and she actually addresses him as "Lord" (45).  After hearing her request for a "place," Charles banishes her to placelessness: "The book says you expire.  No option to renew. . . . Move on" (45).  The prophetic inescapability of texts is also present in scene D where, after Miss Faith informs Aretha that all her remaining teeth are to be removed, the nun intones, "Find solace in the book.  Find order in the book.  Find find find the book" (46).  

Parks' representation of obsessive textuality, shared by Charles and Miss Faith, simultaneously ridicules and harshly critiques their constricted perceptions of Aretha.  By myopically booking their every vision of the domestic, they arrive at equally perverse extremes.  Charles sees snapshots as remnants that will help preserve "order," his shorthand expression for the maintenance of white male domination.  Along these lines, he sees pictures of Aretha as permanent fixing agents, memorials that insure her position of servitude even as her liberation is imminent.  He observes, "Memory is a very important thing. . . . Without it we could be anybody.  You would not know that you're my--help. . . . I would not remember myself to be master" (48).  Through her numerous extractions, Miss Faith attempts to change Aretha's body into a list.  Her taxonomic inclinations reflect the tyranny imposed by encyclopedic modes of identification.  Representing the simultaneous presence of different identification processes,  the contrast between the progression of slides and the emotionally contorted action that goes on beneath them simulates, for the spectator, the dizzying experience of the black woman.  Fundamentally, the issue for Aretha is who is picturing whom.  As long as others are manipulating her image for their purposes, she is entrapped, but at the moment that she becomes the picturer, the manipulator of "scraps of graphy" for her own "book," Aretha is no longer trapped in the sickly accretions of pre-ordained identity.  She begins the bittersweet process of healthy self-articulation (54).  This self-actualization is beautifully evident in a dialogue between Anglor and Aretha in scene F.  Attempting to explain the suggestion of incest that clouds his marriage to Blanca, Anglor says, "It's all legal.  By the book."  Aretha replies, "We got different books" (51).  

The relationship between self-identification and photography operates on a material level in "Open House."  Images and their referents are generally close at hand, even if the processes of image production occasion significant distortion in the perception of one or the other.  While "Greeks (or The Slugs)" maintains a noticeable portion of the materialist impetus, the fifth segment of IM focuses on black identity formation as it relates to the idealized portrait of the American family.  Black feminists scholars point out the incompatibility of Euro-American ideals and African-American experience.  For example, Patricia Hill Collins writes that inapplicable gender roles, long-standing economic inequity, and differing "definitions of family and community" make "traditional social science research . . . especially problematic for African-American families" ("Black" 47, 46).  Revealing the friction generated by disparate cultural perspectives of the family, "Greeks (or The Slugs)" probes the influence that ambition exerts on African-American intrafamilial interactions.   

The vehicle for this examination of the perils of upward mobility is Mr. Sergeant Smith.  As his generic surname insinuates, he is the archetypal family breadwinner, steady and determined in his pursuit of the ever-elusive "distinction" (58).  The segment begins with Smith posing for pictures that he will send to his family.  In an interesting contrast to Aretha, Smith gets pictures taken not for the purpose of memory, but to demonstrate the trajectory of his future.  He says, "I'll have four.  Four shots. . . . Wants em tuh see my shoes as black.  Shirt as khaki.  Stripes as green.  No mop n broom bucket today. . . . Mmm gettin my distinction today.  Thuh events of my destiny ssgonna fall intuh place" (58).  Meticulously directing the details of his portrait, the Sergeant appears justified in his optimism, but the dubious specter of smiles and their ambivalent significance surface in the closing sentence of scene A, foreshadowing the treacherous context in which he pursues his goals.  

Buffy, the Smiths' eldest daughter, asks her mother a very telling question as they discuss what clothes the Biloxi twins should wear: "But what if her dress whips off? What if she is naked?  Can't be outside and naked people will see her she'll be ashamed" (59).  The deep-seated fear of exposure, evidenced in this quotation, not only conveys a female anxiety over public humiliation, but also pinpoints the assimilating African-American family's greatest nightmare: that their guise will somehow be removed, that the white world in which they tenuously exist will somehow uncover them.  While Parks presents this phobia as a result of blacks' uncritical acceptance of the idealized images of mainstream American success, she also posits a hyperawareness of the White gaze as a reason for African-American trepidation.  The Combahee River Collective accentuates the pertinence of this position as they describe the attitude of black parents toward their daughters: "We [black girls] were told to be quiet both for the sake of being 'ladylike' and to make us less objectionable in the eyes of white people" (274).  The Collective deconstructs the racist gaze to engender a healthy space for black female self-definition.  Parks addresses the artistic implications of this dilemma in "An Equation for Black People Onstage" where she writes, "The use of the White in the dramatic equation is, I think, too often seen as the only way of exploring our Blackness; this equation reduces Blackness to merely a state of 'non-Whiteness.'  Blackness in this equation is a people whose lives consist of a series of reactions and responses to the White ruling class" (19).  

Throughout "Greeks (or The Slugs)," the playwright minutely captures the quandaries implicit in integration for African Americans and attempts to dramatize the impact that this process has on the black family.  Smith works in a world where the rhetoric of opportunity circulates freely, but reality for him consists of frustrated ambitions, immense alienation, and huge sacrifices.  Hints of this are apparent in the opening scene when Smith momentarily throws off his janitorial tools to assume the posture of a "desk" man (58).  Although his aspiration for a position of authority is firmly grounded in the Puritan ideal of hard work ("Sergeant Smith has got a stack of papers, but, not to worry, he is a good worker and will do well"), the conditions for his promotion are clear both in the "dive under our desks where it is safe" attitude that authority figures display in times of conflict and in the haunting implications of a shadowy "They" for whom Smith must produce a grin because "They like smiles" (58).  The Sergeant's decision not to send a picture of the turtle-like posture that desk men assume reflects his recognition of the gap between ideology and practice.  As he confesses in scene G, he "always wanted to do me somethin noble," but the realm in which he operates shams nobility, making the virtue a relic of constantly glorified but never emulated "olden days" (71).  Smith responds to this failure not by rejecting the hollowness of this world, but by conforming to the extreme demands that it makes on him.  The price of this conformity is literally staggering.  

The Smith family is totally controlled by the Sergeant's drive for career advancement.  They log the contents of his letters in a ledger and combat the difficulty of separation by planning visits and reminiscing over past trips.  While the tenderness felt by both sides is evident in Smith's introspective island monologues, and in the tortured diligence with which his family observes appearance rituals as they anticipate seeing him, the Sergeant's disruptive absence enshrouds the household.  Muffy's disappointment after not being mentioned in one of her father's letters demonstrates the distance between Smith and his family.  She angrily asks: "How come he didn't write tuh me? . . . Duhdun't he know my name?" (62).  As later events make clear, the sergeant may indeed know his daughter's name, but the employment-necessitated lack of contact between her and him make it likely that he does not know much more.  This lack of knowing, also understood as a literal dearth of seeing, makes both Smith and his family substitute a collective devotion to social ascendancy for a more meaningful range of intrafamilial interplay.  

Mrs. Smith reflects this mindset by contentedly sacrificing everything in her house  --  in fact, almost everything in her life  --  to the "Effort," for the privilege of keeping up appearances.  The meaning of the "Effort" is never made explicit in "Greeks (or The Slugs)," but the use to which Parks puts the term links it closely with the sacrifice-intensive requirements of Mr. Sergeant Smith's distinction.  Near the end of scene B, she and Buffy trade these words:

MRS. SMITH: Men from thuh Effort come by?

BUFFY: 0-800.

MRS. SMITH: Whatja give them.

          BUFFY: Thuh floor lamp.

          MRS. SMITH: With thuh curlicues?  Huh.  Don't need it nohow. 
          Whatcha need    is uh- uhnother girl. . . . Two girls'll make things even.  (61)

Mrs. Smith's desire here for another daughter appears more a product of her affinity for symmetry than a function of maternal longing.  In many ways, this propensity dominates her character, manifesting itself most persistently in a preoccupation over clothing.  As any consideration of her longer speeches will show, depth of parental feeling never completely abandons Mrs. Smith, but her stake in the Sergeant's aspirations transforms her children from dynamic individuals into mannequins that must be covered in accordance with externally formulated mandates.  In this act, one finds not only the crowning tragedy of "Greeks (or The Slugs)," but also Parks' suggestion of the dehumanizing effects of certain forms of dramatic representation.  

Duffy asks his father, "Are we turtles, Mr. Smith?"  Smith replies: "No.  No-uh-boy we iduhn't turtles.  We'se slugs" (71).  In Smith's response to his son's identity-mining, a powerful commentary on the dichotomy of surface/depth, covering/substance unfolds.  Turtle-like attributes mark one as distinguished in the world of "Greeks (or The Slugs)."  Running the risk of oversimplification, I associate this turtleness with whiteness.  Although he completes the deed that brings greater prestige, Smith recognizes that the performance of this act fundamentally does not change who he is: "They gived me uh Distinction.  They set me apart.  They say I caught him but he fell.  He fell on me.  I broked his fall.  I saved his life.  I ain't seen him since.  No, boy -- Duffy-uh-Muffy, Buffy, no, we ain't even turtles. Huh.  We'se slugs" (71).  Accepting the valuations assigned by the dominant culture even as he indicates their insubstantial origins, the Sergeant is the embodiment of tragic self-assessment.  His slugness qua blackness represents for him a badge of inferiority, one that he never can shed even as he tries to out-turtle the turtles in "integrated" society.  The trenchant irony of this situation stems from this fact:  Even as Smith sees the lie of surface-intensive mainstream American success rhetoric, he and his family sacrifice their very bodies to the fruitless pursuit of that lie.⁸  

Smith's closing speeches, along with the parenthetical subtitle of "Greeks (or The Slugs)," add another dimension to the third kingdom concept.  Slugs fall into the animal kingdom, one of the three kingdoms of organismic existence.⁹  By utilizing the motif of the insect in this segment, Parks blends the high dramatic tradition of Greek tragedy and the low, keeper-of-the-rock existence of slugs.¹⁰  Additionally, her conflation of insectness and blackness adeptly illustrates the stature that African Americans occupy both in the eyes of mainstream America and, more distressingly perhaps, in our own self-perception.  While bleakness dominates the insect depictions in IM, it is interesting to note that many insects do not represent terminal states.  Instead, they are transitional stages in a radical process of metamorphosis.  African-American popular culture embraces this insectoid capacity for change.  One member of Digable Planets, Butterfly, demonstrates this clearly in his symbolic name.  Parks admits the optimistic potential for black transformation as she depicts the recovery of history, but her focus on "imperceptible mutability" produces an ironic view of the stasis implicit in black experience.  This point emerges structurally in the titular move from "Snails" in the opening segment to "Greeks (or The Slugs)" in the closing one.  Though the small change from snails to slugs serves to reinforce black third kingdomness, Parks depicts history as a key to understanding the drama of black identity formation.  

Suzan-Lori Parks almost always likens her plays to history.  The second paragraph of this paper offers one example of such a statement, and a more complete articulation of her thoughts about the connection between history and drama may be found in the following:

A play is a blueprint of an event: a way of creating and rewriting history through the medium of literature.  Since history is a recorded or remembered event, theatre, for me, is the perfect place to "make" history -- that is, because so much of African-American history has been unrecorded, dismembered, washed out, one of my tasks as a playwright is to -- through literature and the special strange relationship between theatre and real-life -- locate the ancestral burial ground, dig for bones, find bones, hear the bones sing, write it down. ("Possession" 4)

The passionate lyricism that characterizes this declaration of artistic mission refigures itself in the taut and cryptic "Third Kingdom" section of IM.  Whereas the exploration of photography necessarily focuses on the manipulation of surfaces, the plunge into history constitutes a descent into oft-obscured cemeteries of experience.  The most fundamental reality of these cemeteries for the African American is their inception in the traumatic displacement known as the Middle Passage.  

"Third Kingdom," part two of IM, never explicitly mentions the Middle Passage, but its allusion to the historical phenomenon is unmistakable.  From repartee over whether or not the characters are located in a boat to the repetitive evocation of separation, this episode unflinchingly confronts the central role that the disjuncture of the Middle Passage plays in the formation of African-American identity.¹¹  The confrontation ironically begins with a catalog of the Seers or testifiers:

KIN-SEER: Kin-Seer.

US-SEER: Us-Seer.

SHARK-SEER: Shark-Seer.

SOUL-SEER: Soul-Seer.

OVER-SEER: Over-Seer.

Through this spiritual summoning of witnesses, Parks indicates the nature of the journey/research that is necessary to recover the "unrecorded, dismembered, washed out" facets of Black history; and by extension, she suggests the depths that African Americans must probe: first, to find the lacerations induced by the Middle Passage; then, to heal them.  

Kin-Seer emphasizes the subliminal quality of the Middle Passage's dislocating effect when she says: "Last night I dreamed of where I comed from.  But where I comed from diduhnt look like nowhere like I been" (37).  While this remark clearly indicates some function of memory, the effect of this memory is at best ambivalent.  One way of reading the passage suggests the radical differentiation between where Kin-Seer "comed from" and where she has, since being removed from that original place, "been."  An alternative interpretation highlights the ultimate failure of Kin-Seer's remembrance.  She dreams of where she "comed from," but the image in her dream somehow does not "look like nowhere" that she recognizes.  Much of the ambiguous incongruity between "comed from" and "been" arises from the purposefully vague syntax of her statement.  Despite this vagueness, the physical and psychological distancing that forced departure wrought in Kin-Seer's life emerges lucidly.  The play on the unconscious vision-making and the aspiration/longing connotations of the word, "dream," evokes both the degree to which the Middle Passage affects past events as it saturates the psyche, conditioning memory, and the influence that it has on Kin-Seer's future, nestling itself tightly at the base of her identity.  Just how tightly becomes clear when one considers the most powerful figuration of the third kingdom concept in IM, that of African-American-ness.  

Recounting a dream in which a fish swallows him, Shark-Seer makes this observation: "I whuduhnt me no more and I whuduhnt no fish.  My new self was uh third Self made by thuh space in between" (39).  The division of self evident in Shark-Seer's dream is analogous to the disintegration that each Seer in "Third Kingdom" witnesses.  While the racial aspect of this self-splitting is implied in the slave transport motif that structures this segment, an exchange between Soul-Seer, Over-Seer, and Kin-Seer makes it explicit:

SOUL-SEER: Duhduhnt he duhduhnt he know my name?  Ssblak ssblak ssblakallblak!

OVER-SEER: Thats your self youre looking at!  Wonder #1 of my glass-bottomed boat.

KIN-SEER: My uther me then waved back at me and then I was happy.  But my uther me whuduhnt wavin at me.  My uther me was wavin at my Self.  My uther me was wavin at uh black black speck in thuh middle of thuh sea where years ago from uh boat I had been--UUH! (38)

Blackness pervades both the speech and the self-definition of  Soul-Seer and Kin-Seer, while the Over-Seer's whiteness is marked throughout "Third Kingdom" not only by his highly ironic label, but also by the authoritative role that he assumes.  When the Seers give the syrupy call, "We are all smiling," the Over-Seer responds with "Quiet, you, or you'll be jettisoned" (38).  Although the Over-Seer holds a position of power, or, perhaps, in some sense, because he does, the profundity of what occurs as an African traverses the Atlantic to become a slave is captured most candidly in his speech: "Half the world had fallen away making 2 worlds and a sea between.  Those 2 worlds inscribe the Third Kingdom" (39)  

Shark-Seer's "third Self" and Over-Seer's "Third Kingdom" are products of the forced meeting between Africa and America.  Despite distinctions in their respective uses of third Self and Third Kingdom, the crux of each term is the dependent sphere that the African American creates as she attempts to balance "two unreconciled strivings . . . in one dark body" (Du Bois 215). Thus, when Kin-Seer explains the splintering caused by her Middle Passage-inspired sea going, she not only identifies a geographic displacement, but more substantially, she also calls attention to herself as a transformed site, an individual third kingdom.  Patricia Hill Collins calls this position of connected exteriority and interiority that of the "outsider within."¹²  While Collins describes the "outsider within" as an individual who can be incisive because she has a "special standpoint"  ("Learning" 514),  Parks dwells on the trauma that precedes incision.  

Figurative strategies that drive other parts of the play vigorously further the exploration of black identity, and "Third Kingdom" generates a visceral impetus that lends greater resonance to these other efforts.  The influence exerted by the nebulous aura of "Third Kingdom" arises most clearly in the segment's commentary on bones.  As integral units of the skeleton, bones provide support and protection to highly vulnerable parts of the human body.  Remnants of bodily decomposition, they often are closely associated with death.  Soul-Seer's observation, "thuh hullholesfull of bleachin bones," clearly refers to the deathly conditions that Africans endured in the hulls of slave ships during the Middle Passage (39).  Yet another aspect of his remark becomes clear when one recalls Suzan-Lori Parks' metaphor for the act of writing drama/history: "One of my tasks as a playwright is to . . . locate the ancestral grounds, dig for bones, find bones, hear the bones sing, write it down."¹³  With Parks' comment in mind, the significance of Soul-Seer's hullfull of "bleachin bones" widens to encompass not only the tangible, sea-surrounded skeletons of dead or nearly dead Africans, but also the supportive and protective vitality that those bones potentially represent.  The playwright's depiction of the "ancient burial ground" inextricably ties the material skeletons of African predecessors to the black identity-rejuvenating history project of discovering those skeletons.  In this sense, Us-Seer's explanation, "We be walkin wiggly cause we left our bones in bed," indicates that the post-Middle Passage psychological disorientation of the African American stems from a lack of self-knowledge, and metaphorically captures the physical dislocation experienced by the ocean-tossed African (40).¹⁴  

Just as bones function in the above-elaborated conception, so, too, does "Third Kingdom" operate in the overarching structure of IM.  The segment's figurative evocation of the Middle Passage strengthens and, ultimately, historicizes the play's other representations of African-American identity.  Aside from the position that "Third Kingdom" occupies in the title of the larger work, the intimate, almost direct re-exploration of its themes in "Third Kingdom (Reprise)" offers strong proof of the centrality that Parks attributes to its representations.  The appeal of these representations is that they aid the playwright's exploration of the connection between drama and history.  By innovatively dramatizing historical moments, Parks nimbly shows the aesthetic daring that woos the avant garde while simultaneously cultivating an edginess that, as her circulation in the black community expands, will be compared to the attitude and approach of Hip-Hop.  

Photography and history simultaneously serve as content and metaphor in IM.  Language, though occupying both positions, functions uniquely because it has the added duty of being the medium of presentation.  From this distinction, Parks' examination of language takes on a more elemental quality.  Certainly, history circumscribes the black encounter with English and photography, yet language's centrality to the representational project of history and drama makes the probing of its influence on African-American identity particularly inviting for the playwright.  Parks most effectively can see her artistic object and, equally as important, herself, when she focuses on the fundamentals of communication and mis-communication.  Throughout IM, this is precisely her endeavor.  

"Third Kingdom (Reprise)" and "Greeks (or The Slugs)" both suggest language's impact on self-definition, but "Snails," the first section of IM, depicts the effects of language on African-American identity most self-consciously.  In this segment, a central focus is "Black English," and the varying responses that this dialect elicits from mainstream white America.  Revealing the relationship between speech and employment/social status, Parks displays a womanist consciousness.  The use of a community of black women in "Snails" is similar to the communal convention of many white feminist plays.  However, Parks' manipulation of the stereotypes of black womanhood and her dramatization of the interrelation of race, class, and gender oppression show a stronger kinship to womanism.  

"Snails" begins with Charlene and Molly speaking these lines:

CHARLENE: How dja get through it?

MOLLY: Mm not through it. (21)

The dialect typified by the use of "dja" and "Mm" calls attention to the pronunciation patterns of these characters.  While these eccentricities clearly identify Charlene's and Molly's speech, the significance that accrues from its use extends beyond Parks' exercise of a "good ear."  Dialect speech highlights certain racial and social connotations of its speakers.  From these distinctions, a dichotomy quickly develops between "Black English" speakers and "standard" English speakers, wrong talkers and right talkers.  Molly and Charlene reflect an awareness of this division as they discuss the former's expulsion from school:

MOLLY: They-expelled-me.

CHARLENE: Straight up?

MOLLY: Straight up.  "Talk right or youre outta here!"  I couldnt.  I walked.

Nope.

"Speak correctly or you'll be dismissed!"  (25-26)

Although a measure of humor attends Molly's description of her school experience, the implications of her refusal to "talk right" are profound.  An examination of The Naturalist's monologues makes this clear.  

The Naturalist's speech strongly contrasts that of Molly and Charlene.  Describing his data-collecting method, the researcher says that "a most careful preparation of one's fly is the only way by in which the naturalist can insure the capturence of his subjects in a state of nature" (27).  His polysyllabic diction clearly carries a hint of comedy, as it bends toward pseudo-erudition. Despite the satirical elements in The Naturalist's portrait, the authority of his pronouncements remains unchallenged.  This becomes particularly striking when the insidiousness of his remarks pertaining to Molly and Charlene is considered.  Commenting on his surveillance of the two women, he concludes:

Having accumulated a wealth of naturally occurring observations knowing how our subjects occur in their own world (mundus primtivus), the question now arises as to how we of our world (mundus modernus) best accommodate them. . . . The great cake society is crumbling.  I ask us to realize that those who do not march with us do not march not because they will not but because they cannot. . . . I ask that they somehow be taken care of for there are too many of them-- and by "them" I mean of course "them roaches." (29)

The parameters that define mundus primtivus as inferior to mundus modernus are the arbitrary designations of The Naturalist, but they have their basis in a system of cultural distinction that legitimizes his arbitrariness.  Within this system, language plays an incredibly important role.  The scientist's observation abstractly spells out the stakes of talking "right" or "wrong."  The economic impact that this differentiation has on Molly illustrates the situation more concretely.   

Because she cannot master the nuances of standard English, Molly loses her job.  Her unemployment causes frustration and produces this resolution: "I'm all decided.  Aint gonna work.  Cant.  Aint honest.  Anyone with sense dont wanna work no how" (27).  Intensifying this conclusion is an added sense of general indignation.  Molly remarks, "Stuff like this happens every day y know?  This isnt uh special case mines iduhnt uh uhnn" (25).  While irony and a measure of accuracy fill these characterizations of work and institutional racism, the power of The Naturalist's pronouncements is reflected in their capacity to absorb opposition even at the moment of most vehement attack.  One sees this in the scientist's casual ability to parry Molly's every objection with the paternalistic smugness of the quip, "They need our help" (29).   

Sherley Anne Williams gives a similar portrayal of the elitist and racist tenor of certain scientific discourse in her novel, Dessa Rose (1986).  Through the juxtaposition of Nehemiah Adams, white social researcher, and Odessa, black runaway slave woman and subject of Adams' research, Williams suggests the encompassing quality of scientific narrative and the struggle of the black woman to escape it.  In John Edgar Wideman's Philadelphia Fire (1991), Margaret Jones voices her skepticism regarding scientists: "You mean you'll do your thing and forget. . . . Write your book and gone.  Just like the social workers and busybodies from the University.  They been studying us for years" (20).  Jones' indignation at the fleeting, exploitative interests of the scientists intensifies because of the immense credibility that their version of black life receives.  In "Snails,"  Parks minutely dramatizes this quandary and elaborates the disorienting effect that such a situation has on the black psyche.  As she contextualizes this disorientation, the playwright demonstrates her most overt engagement of issues related to gender and language.  

The first four scenes in "Snails" alternate between conversations of Molly and Charlene and extended monologues by The Naturalist.  In these episodes, a notion of gendered speaking spaces emerges.  The women converse in the kitchen and the living room of their house while the scientist lectures from behind a podium.  Through the juxtaposition of gendered spaces, Parks not only delineates the forces that influence the circulation of language, but also formally replicates the activity of these forces.  Suggesting the relationship of speech and self-identity, these opening scenes introduce strains that will be climactically modified in scenes E and F.   

Charlene repeatedly alludes either to the preparation or the consumption of food.  She asks Molly, "You want some eggs?" and later, inquires the same of Verona and Lutzky (25, 31, 32).  Her offers could reflect pride in a culinary prowess.  Perhaps, Charlene knows that she can cook and wishes to share the fruits of her skill.  Notwithstanding the possibility of this view, a different perception of her words emerges when race and gender are considered.  Describing stereotypes of African-American women, Patricia Hill Collins notes: "By loving, nurturing, and caring for her white children and 'family' better than her own, the mammy symbolizes the dominant group's perceptions of the ideal Black female relationship to elite white male power" (Black 71).  In her consistent mothering, Charlene invites comparison to the mammy.  Although most of her speeches occur in the company of other black women, the appearance of Lutzky, the white exterminator, near the end of "Snails" illustrates the influence of white male expectation on Charlene.  Parks uses Charlene to accentuate the ambivalent position of the nurturing black female.  While Charlene's concern for Molly and Verona appears sincere, her attention to Lutzky resembles groveling.  

In her evocation of the mammy, Parks engages a strong literary tradition.  In Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Aunt Chloe is an early example of the anomalous position of certain black slave women.  While Aunt Chloe is beloved and powerful in the St. Clare kitchen and in her own, she is powerless to stop the disintegration of both households via the death of Eva and the selling of her husband, Tom.  Trudier Harris suggests the inaccuracy of viewing mammies or domestics as completely powerless in From Mammies to Militants: Domestics in Black American Fiction (1982).  By showing strategies of opposition that black women adopted while working in white folks' kitchens, Harris reveals the empowering impetus seized by domestics.  Robin D. G. Kelley also details this phenomena in Race Rebels (1994).  While Parks acknowledges this empowering potential through Aretha, she wants to dramatize the forces that hinder healthy identification for black women.  Using The Naturalist's monologues, she demonstrates the conditioning and unsettling effects that white male patriarchal discourses have on the words and acts of African‑American women. 

An indication of the linguistic influence that The Naturalist exerts over Molly and Charlene appears in their names.  While the women always refer to themselves as Mona and Chona, their lines, until section E, are marked by monikers that he confers.¹⁵  Mona and Chona see and name themselves, but The Naturalist's declarations circumscribe and overrule theirs.  On one level, the organization of "Snails," with Mona and Chona speaking first and then being interpreted and recast by the scientist, produces this effect; however, Parks enhances the structural impetus with a syntactical infusion.  The Naturalist uses "an apparatus" called "the fly" to facilitate his observation of Mona and Chona (27).  Adding an overtly sexual dimension to Parks' depiction of white male and black female interaction, the phallic connotations of this device intensify the link between the scientist's pronouncements and his desire for social determinism.  Pervaded by voyeurism, The Naturalist's project clearly thwarts the development of African-American female identity.  While the playwright highlights this development, her subtle artistry leaves room for a non-reductive engagement.  Thus, the researcher's sexist discourse is fully uncovered, but its power to disrupt Mona and Chona does not diminish. 

Parks casts white patriarchal discourse as a major hurdle to African-American self-definition, yet her intraracial exploration hints at problems that are equally as crippling as external pressures.  "Snails" begins with a fairly focused conversation between Mona and Chona.  But by the end of section A, their speeches take on the suppositional quality of fairytales:

CHONA: Once there was uh robber who would come over and rob us regular . . .

MONA: Once there was uh me named Mona who wanted to jump ship but didnt. (26)

This continues in section C where Chona offers a parabolic remark: "Once there was uh little lamb who followed Mary good n put uh hex on Mary.  When Mary dropped dead, thuh lamb was in thuh lead" (27).  Displaying a propensity to confound the past and the present, exchanges between Mona and Chona are the linguistic corollary to the fractured sense of time that plagues Mr. Sergeant Smith.¹⁶  Their statements reveal an awareness of the conflict that conditions their lives, but the lack of a viable resolution pushes their expression toward a sort of threnody that is testimony to their splintering.  

Whereas previous episodes separated Mona and Chona from The Naturalist (known here as Lutzky), the vignette in scene E brings both parties into immediate contact.  It also introduces Verona and The Robber, key players in Parks' synthesis of identity-forming forces.  Noticing an infestation problem, Chona calls Lutzky to exterminate the house.  Irony attends this gesture not only because the ostensible exterminator earlier installed a "fly" to aid his "bugging" of the premises, but also because, echoing the elitist rhetoric of his initial speeches, Lutzky conflates blackness and insectness by seeing Mona, Chona, and Verona as "roaches" that must be squirted.  Containing the strongest sexual imagery in IM, Lutzky's language is filled with climactic nodes:  "There goes my squirt gun.  Did you feel it?" (33).  The exterminator's "squirting" of the women invokes rape, masturbation, and drowning.  Although numerous symbolic meanings surround his actions, Lutzky's inability to distinguish among "ChonaMonaVerona" signals the problems with his misguided, though credentialed declamations (33).¹⁷  

The exterminator's constant confusion of Mona, Chona, and Verona generates a carnivalesque atmosphere.  Beneath the comic surface, an intense seriousness informs his miscalling.  He reveals it as he muses:  "Am I wrong in making a livelihood-- meager as it may be--from the vermin that feed on the crumbs which fall from the table of the broken cake of civilization?" (32).  Mona, Chona, and Verona are indistinct to Lutzky because he considers them social parasites.  As a result, the exterminator squirts them, symbolically extinguishing their individuality.  Portrayed as a black man, The Robber attempts to neutralize this truncation of self-expression as he silently "steals the roach and attempts to exit" (30).¹⁸  Realizing that meaningful self-identification cannot occur in an atmosphere dominated by external scrutiny and judgment, he seeks to end white surveillance.  

On one level, The Robber's random appearance bespeaks an inconstant presence.  Thus, his commitment to aiding Mona, Chona, and Verona must be questioned.  His identification as a robber seemingly accentuates this perception, but Parks appears to toy with stereotypical presentations of the black male in his portraiture.  Lutzky says of him: "Parents of the Muslim faith?  My father used to frequent the Panthers" (34).  This reference to the Nation of Islam and the Black Panthers respectively hints at a degree of spirituality and militancy in The Robber.  While the use to which he will put the roach is never made explicit, his intention to liberate the self-articulative sphere of the black woman from the control of the white man is clear.  True to Parks' entangling dramatizations, this liberation only may take place in order that The Robber can assume the conditioning position occupied by Lutzky.  Despite this possibility, his actions in scene E incline toward at least a temporal freeing of expressive space. In the final scene of "Snails," Parks depicts the ambivalence that inheres in this gesture by portraying the agonizing results of self-examination for Verona. 

The substance of scene F, Verona's monologue seemingly represents a triumph because it is delivered from behind the podium.  Despite the power associated with this space, her remarks indicate the extent to which white patriarchal discourses saturate her character.  Parks heightens this effect by linking the generic figure of The Naturalist with television icon Marlin Perkins.  Discussing the influence that Perkins' Wild Kingdom exercised over her childhood, Verona touches on many things, but one striking observation concerns his (mis)understanding of the workings of language.  She recounts: "Marlin loved and respected all wild things.  His guides took English and turned it into the local lingo so that he could converse with the natives" (36).  The harmony implied in Perkins' contact with animals is contested by Verona's dog, Namib.  In contrast to the tractable "wild things" that she saw on television, "Namib refused tuh be trained. . . . [W]hen I said someuhn like 'sit' he wouldnt n 'come' made im go" (36).  At first glance, the childhood story of a stubborn pet does not appear extraordinary; but in this instance, its crystallization of the role that language plays in individual perception makes it particularly interesting.  

Verona endorses the "took" and "turned" philosophy that makes "wild things" malleable in the hands of Marlin Perkins.  When Namib challenges this perspective, she abuses the dog and forms a distrust of all dogs, categorizing them as "domesticated" (37).  While reminiscent of The Naturalist/Lutzky's attempts to control his "subjects" through  categorization, Verona's actions are doubly ironic since they also carry the seeds of self-hatred.  In a frequently quoted passage, Janie's grandmother refers to the black woman as "de mule uh de world" (Their Eyes 14).  Parks picks up on this animalization in the insect imagery of IM.  Yet in the final scene of "Snails," she introduces the connection between black women and dogs.  The link of black womanhood and domestication emerges through Chona.  Verona's labeling of Namib as domesticated creates a metaphorical kinship, and Namib's name brings greater complexity to this connection.  In what could be an expression of racial pride, Verona names Namib "after thuh African sands" (36).  Thus, the dog becomes a symbol of black womanhood not only in association with domesticity, but also in its evocation of a common racial heritage. 

Verona's rejection of Namib perpetuates the oppressive trend of arbitrary distinction, and it conveys the self-abnegation expected of black women as they assume positions of power.¹⁹  This episode typifies the ingenuous artistry of Suzan-Lori Parks.  Manipulating the traditional distinction between wild and domesticated animals, she interlaces this theme with the larger issue of human identification.  Near the end of scene F, Verona dissects a dog in anticipation of finding a difference in "the heart of such a disagreeable domestic thing" (37).  She concludes: "But no.  Nothing different.  Everything in its place.  Do you know what that means?  Everything in its place.  Thats all" (37).  With this exposure of the innards, Verona's perceptions topple, and, concomitantly, Parks demonstrates the shortcomings of linguistic frames that impose upon rather than allow entities to define themselves.  This experience suggests that the remnants of domination remain, even as the apparatus of linguistic domination recedes.  The small but firm hope lies in Verona's confronting, at least, the basic fallacy in her beliefs.  

Like two of her oft-mentioned inspirations, James Joyce (1882-1941) and Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), Parks incessantly seeks aesthetic innovation, and she does so by rummaging among the bones of black existence.  The fractious interiority classically depicted by Adrienne Kennedy in Funnyhouse of a Negro (1969) prefigures the particularized self-alienation of Imperceptible Mutabilities.  The rhythmic speeches of Parks' characters seem deeply invested in the overtly musical dramatizations of Ntozake Shange.  Parks' focus on the bittersweet relationships within the black family seem an extension of Lorraine Hansberry's Raisin In The Sun (1959).  Stepping to the more general realm of African-American drama, her preoccupation with the stage as a vehicle to recuperate black American history evokes a long line of writers, the most notable in the last fifteen years being August Wilson.  These large positioning gestures, highlighting the multiple frames that find points of intersection because of Parks' artistry, deepen one's appreciation of the playwright's individuality, even as they indicate her indebtedness:  For Parks, the hunger for innovation demands the marshaling of every resource.  Her achievement in IM argues that sermons on the "blackness of blackness" (Ellison 9) need not always be eulogies.  

Notes

1.  Hereafter I will abbreviate Parks' play as IM.

2.  Diamond (86), Carr (154), and Solomon (76).  Carr's article quotes Parks as saying "experience" instead of "history," but I assume that this is merely a misprint.

3.  Diamond writes that the "photographic image" represents "official versions of that (African-American) history" (86).  Solomon's comments are similar, though she conflates the shadow and the photographic image to arrive at a somewhat insightful, but not completely clear, conclusion: "That shadow (of the photographic image) -- sometimes represented by projected photographs, sometimes by the idea of posing for photographs -- is, of course, itself a representation, a representation created by whites" (76).  Carr agrees with Solomon in joining the photographic image with its shadow as she writes that the two are comprised of "the representations and definitions made by white folks" (154).

4.   Unless otherwise specified, I quote Parks from her IM or from her critical remarks in the volume that anthologizes this play, The America Play and Other Works.

5.  The propriety of the traditional dramatic adjectives "flat" and "round" when applied to Suzan-Lori Parks' work is demonstrated by a speech from her play, Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (1990):  "Before Columbus thuh worl usta be roun they put uh /d/ on thuh end of roun making round.  Thus they set in motion thuh end" (102).  For Parks, the curtailment of possibility inherent in fixed definition is artistic death.  The diversity of African-American experience demands roun-ness, not only in aesthetic but in cultural/historical terms.

6.  In this project, Parks stands squarely in the tradition of the slave narrative and early black orature.  See Frederick Douglass's  Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. Written By Himself (1845), Linda Brent's, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Written By Herself (1861), and Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I A Woman" (1851).

7.  Though described and clothed as a nun, Miss Faith was cast as an African-American man in a BACA Downtown production of IM ("Signifying" 75).  This move is consistent with Parks' mischievous, yet serious intent to confound expectation, especially in the relationship between language and image.  In some ways, it also relates to Gloria Naylor's depiction of Miss Maple in Bailey's Cafe (1992).

8.  See the climactic moment in scene F when Smith returns home legless with his Distinction only to find that his wife has lost her eyes.  This episode also echoes the textual tyranny exhibited by Miss Faith and Charles in Open House as Mrs. Smith laments the loss of the ledger, an ostensible method of verifying Smith's identity: "Ssstoo bad.  We needs documentation.  Proof" (69-70). 

9.  See Margulis et al. (13-14) for a discussion of the evolution in organismic taxonomy from three kingdoms to five kingdoms.  I choose to follow the rubric of the older three kingdom classification system because it seems that this is the model that Parks has in mind.  As he asks questions of identification throughout "Greeks (or The Slugs)," Duffy is a device for Parks' manipulation of these distinctions.  See especially scene F (66-71).

10.  Scene C depicts Mr. Sergeant Smith as rock-bound.  He says: "It is my job to keep watch over this rock. . . . It is my job to keep this rock clean!  My rock is very clean.  My rock is the cleanest of all rocks on our island home" (61).  While the connection between Smith and the slug is made clear in later vignettes, here is an example of parallelism in habitat.  Like shell-dwelling slugs, Smith is confined to a small space that conditions his movements and his self-definition.  Solomon comments on the formal and organizational affinity between this segment and traditional tragedy (77-79).

11.  This move is a favorite of several authors within the African-American literary tradition.  See Richard Wright's Twelve Million Black Voices (1969), Robert Hayden's "Middle Passage" (1945), and Henry Dumas' "Ark of Bones" (1969).   For specifically dramatic depictions of the Middle Passage's influence on black identity, consider Amiri Baraka's Dutchman and The Slave (1964) and August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone (1988).

12.  See "Learning From The Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought" for a full explanation of the "outsider within."  Particularly, note that Collins uses domestics to bolster her claims, and that she sees the workplace as an arena that vigorously challenges the healthy development of black identity.  Parks' and Collins' focus on similar areas of African-American experience makes the juxtaposition of their views compelling.

13.  "Possession" 4.  A very interesting point is made in another paragraph of this essay, one that bears quoting because it deeply influences the conclusions that I come to later in this paragraph.  Parks writes: "The bones tell us what was, is, will be; and because their song is a play -- something that through a production actually happens -- I'm working theatre like an incubator to create 'new' historical events."  This explanation helps clarify both the discovery impetus and the historical and creative impulses that emerge so insistently in IM.

14.  I read the unsteadiness felt by the Seers as emblematic of a lack of self-knowledge.  This I infer from Kin-Seer's query, "Howwe gonna find my Me?"  To which, Soul-Seer responds: "Rock.  Thuh boat" (40).  Rocking the boat obviously would make the Seers aware of their physical "Me," but Us-Seer suggests that their lack of balance really arises from a dearth that is more fundamental  --  a dearth of history.  This theme is taken up in "Third Kingdom (Reprise)."  

15.  The Naturalist christens Mona and Chona in his first speech: "In our observations of the subjects subjects which for our purposes we have named 'Molly' and 'Charlene' " (27).  Solomon offers a clue regarding the rationale for Parks' change in the women's speech labels: "By narrating themselves . . . the women widen the gap between image and reality.  If they don't fall in, it's only because there's also a way in which self-narration can create autonomy; whoever writes the history controls the history, after all" (77).

16.  What I describe as fractured time finds an implicit enunciation in one of Smith's monologues: "There's four hours every day that I kin say 'today' and you'll know what today I mean. . . . Times when my day's yours -- and yours is mines" (65).  In its focus on "overlap," this remark also bespeaks the twenty hours that separate Smith from his family.  In like manner, Mona's and Chona's confusion of time, specifically their inability to synchronize their past with their present, amplifies a sort of separation.

17.  Verona informs us of Lutzky's educational pedigree in the remark, "Wipe-um-out Dr. Lutzky with uh P uh H and uh D" (31).  His credentials only contribute further to Parks' examination of authoritative discourses and the fallacies that underlie them.

18.  This roach is The Naturalist's (Lutzky's) "fly" whose "form" he has modified so that it resembles "the common house insect hausus cockruckus" (27).

19.  Verona's occupation is "euthanasia specialist" (36).  She makes a living by killing animals in a veterinary hospital.  In this regard, her actions are more disturbing because they go beyond self-effacement to genocide.

References

Baraka, Amiri.  Dutchman and the Slave.  New York: Morrow, 1964.

Brent, Linda.  Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Written By Herself.  In The Classic Slave Narratives. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.  New York: Mentor, 1987.  333-513.

Carr, C.  Review of IM.  Artforum  28.3 (1989): 154.

Collins, Patricia Hill.  Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and The Politics of Empowerment.  New York: Routledge, 1991.

---.  "Learning From The Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought." Social Problems  33.6 (Dec, 1986): 514-32.

Combahee River Collective.  "The Combahee River Collective Statement."  In HomeGirls: A Black Feminist Anthology.  Ed. Barbara Smith.  New York: Kitchen Table, 1983.  272-82.

Diamond, Liz.  "Perceptible Mutability in the Word Kingdom."  Theater  24.3  (1993): 86-87.

Douglass, Frederick.  Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. Written By Himself.  1845.  Ed. Benjamin Quarles.  Cambridge: Belknap, 1993.

Du Bois, W. E. B.  The Souls of Black Folk.  1930.  In Three Negro Classics.  New York: Avon, 1965.

Dumas, Henry.  "Ark of Bones."  1969.  In Ark of Bones and Other Stories.  Eds. Hale Chatfield and Eugene Redmond.  Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1970.  1-15.

Hansberry, Lorraine.  A Raisin in the Sun.  New York: Random House, 1959.

Harris, Trudier.  From Mammies To Militants: Domestics in Black American Fiction. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1982.

Hayden, Robert.  "Middle Passage."  1959.  In Selected Poems.  By Hayden.  New York: October House, 1966.  65-70.

hooks, bell.  "The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators."  In Black Looks: Race and Representation.  Boston: South End, 1992.  115-31.

Hurston, Zora Neale.  Their Eyes Were Watching God.  1937.  New York: Harper and Row, 1990.

Kelley, Robin D. G.  Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class.  New York: Free Press, 1994.

Kennedy, Adrienne.  Funnyhouse of a Negro.  New York: Samuel French, 1969.

Margulis, Lynn, Karlene V. Schwartz, and Michael Dolan.  The Illustrated Five Kingdoms: A Guide to the Diversity of Life on Earth.  New York: HarperCollins, 1994.

Naylor, Gloria.  Bailey's Cafe.  New York: Harcourt Brace, 1992.

Parks, Suzan-Lori.  IM.  In The America Play and Other Works.  By Parks.  New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995.  23-71.

---.  Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World.  In The America Play above. 99-131.

---.  "From Elements of Style."  In The America Play above.  6-18.

---.  "An Equation for Black People Onstage."  In The America Play above. 19-22.

---.  "Possession."  In The America Play above.  3-5. 

Rawley, James A.  The Transatlantic Slave Trade.  New York: Norton, 1981.

Solomon, Alisa.  " 'Signifying on the Signifyin': The Plays of Suzan Lori-Parks." Theater 21.3 (1990): 73-80.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher.  Uncle Tom's Cabin; Or, Life Among the Lowly.  1852.  Ed. Elizabeth Ammons.  New York: Norton, 1994.

Truth, Sojourner.  "Ain't I A Woman."  1851.  In Black Sister: Poetry by Black American Women, 1746-1980.  Ed. Erlene Stetson.  Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1981. 24-25.